Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to the field of protecting content in a computer system.
Description of Related Art
There is a growing demand for delivering games and other content to be played at a client device of the user. However, the existing distribution models give rise to many problems, especially in relation to digital rights management, in order to prevent unauthorised use or redistribution of high-value content.
Delivering a game or other large multimedia content over a network is limited by the characteristics of the network, such as the availability of bandwidth, consistency of the bandwidth, cost to the user, potential throttling and/or network-imposed hard caps on the volume of data that can be downloaded by the user. These problems are exacerbated for very large data volumes (large file sizes) which take a long time to download (e.g. tens of minutes, or even several hours).
There is a desire to allow a user to enjoy a sample of the content, prior to making a purchase of the full content. Also, there is a desire to allow rental of content for a limited time period, in exchange for a certain payment. These and other new mechanisms for delivering content have been inhibited by the existing content delivery infrastructure.
It is now desired to provide a system which addresses one or more of these limitations of the current art, or other such limitations, as will be appreciated from the discussion and description herein. In particular, it is desired to develop other approaches for providing content, such as video games, on a client device.